One hundred fifty issues of Ombre e Luci—a milestone in what we hope will be a long journey ahead, rich with encounters. Stories, words, languages, and images we curate with care for each new edition, to show how essential it is to be in relationship with one another, with the firm conviction that no one should be left behind. Ombre e Luci was born 37 years ago to weave bonds across distance with people who found no friendship or connection around them because of mental disability. Those distances have narrowed for many in those 37 years, but not for all—and nowhere near as widely or completely as we would hope, as Olga Gurevitch writes to us from Russia. Yet signs of that narrowing do exist, even in worlds like cinema, which we explore in this issue's focus.
For Ombre e Luci itself, the distances have shrunk. Our biweekly newsletter closes the gap between print editions. Twitter brings us good leads. And our website, with its expanding space, now gives readers access to our archive—we've climbed back to the year 2000, which feels like yesterday but isn't—full of hope and paths to follow.
Fresh air for difficult times like ours, when we must ensure that no one goes unnoticed or feels abandoned. These are times when trust and hope must be sustained, as Lucina Spaccia reminds us, even when our thoughts turn dark. Hope often described by Mariangela Bertolini—in the essay we republish here and elsewhere—alongside faith, which arises precisely "in dark moments, in moments unbearable to live through." Let us nourish together that "force that overwhelms us and makes us endure; a force that—Mariangela said, in another place—I believe arrives through the people we know: parents, friends, and someone else who is the One who lives in us. Even when we want nothing more to do with Him. He sustains us and tells us 'Go forward and do not be afraid.'" Because hope blooms in being together.